Worst Brew Day Ever
Oh man. Where to start. I guess at the beginning.
We went to buy our ingredients, and the guy didn’t have Kent Goldings, or Challenger hops. He also took *forever* to get our order together. Maybe this was an omen, but we didn’t even blink.
We put our grain into the mash tun, heated the strike water, dumped it into the mash tun, and promptly broke our floating thermometer. Luckily, it wasn’t in the mash, so we grabbed another thermometer, and according to that, we hadn’t met our strike temperature. So we put it up on the burner (our mash tun is a keg, so we can heat it directly), and just at that time, Tash came out with our digital Williams Sonoma thermometer, which worked really well…. and told us that we had surpassed our strike temp!! The first thermometer, we discovered, was stuck and wouldn’t go past 150. Dammit. Oh well. At this point, if that was all that went wrong, we’d consider ourselves lucky.
The mash sat at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time, and then it was time to start the sparge process. We heated up the sparge water, and set things up to pump from the water boiler to the sparge arm, and the pump was useless. We hadn’t set things up the way that I had done in my pump tests, so the pump wasn’t getting a constant gravity feed. We reverted to using gravity to move the sparge water. Even that was really far more difficult than it needed to be. The siphon gods were *really* not with us, and once we *did* get the water moving, one of the stoppers that closes the ends of the Phil’s sparger arm fell off.
Oh yeah, somewhere in there, I was trying to cut a hose for something and sliced my thumb wide open. This put me out of commission for some time, leaving Matt to do a couple of pretty back-breaking things by himself. No bueno.
So there’s water going in and we realize that our false bottom is not connected to the spout, so nothing is able to leave the mash tun. We had to turn it on its side and reconnect it. This was not possible, and so we had to transfer everything to another vessel, field-fabricate and sanitize a proper connection, and then retransfer everything back into the mash tun so we could run off the wort.
We did finally get the wort run off into the hot liquor tank, and we did the boil, and now we’re ready to put it through the wort chiller and into the fermentor. No go. Our racking cane got clogged, the wort chiller got clogged, the tubing got clogged, and we had to restart the siphon so many times that I’m sure Matt and I spit at *least* a gallon of wort on my driveway.
Once the fermenter was about half full, and we looked in to see nothing but hop leaves and about 3 inches of beer left in the HLT, we figured after all of this, we were only going to come out with about 4 gallons of wort, it was probably contaminated from trying to recover from the various clogs, siphoning way too much, etc., it was probably not going to taste right, and so we called it our very first wasted batch.
It’s the kind of brew day that makes you just want to run to the store for your beer. Not a single thing worked right. Absolute misery.
*** Matt’s Viewpoint on the “Day that will live in infamy”***
Yeah it was a comedy of errors. In all the years I have brewed I NEVER had a brew day like this and I never lost a batch. I guess it was bound to happen. This whole fiasco really just drives home the fact that we need to do some finalizing features on our system. For one thing we need to put a throughwall ball cock on the hlt to easy use with the pump and have premeasured, cut tubing so we don’t have to do it while brewing. Hence preventing Jonesy (or even myself) slicing off a didgit and looking like a shop teacher with butter knife sharp knives trying to cut foodsafe tubing. Our system is about 90% there and after a few slight additions we will have a lean mean system.
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